Embargo’d Digital Newsprint?
Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition wrote an opinion piece in this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that the major print media (newspapers) should embargo their content for something like 24 hours before publishing it via online media sources. The thinking is that this would force people who wanted timely news to acquire it either via dead trees, or some sort of subscription service of the papers, which would bring them revenue and thus save the print establishment.
There’s a clear analogy to the music industry here, in my mind. News consumers have a choice: paying for a product or getting it for free. Unlike in the case of Napster, however, those reading articles on the web aren’t stealing them — they’re just ‘paying’ with ad-support. So, the ad support isn’t generating enough revenue to pay for the content, and this is adversely hurting the legacy business.
My first and foremost sentiment is pretty blunt: too bad. Newspapers used to have a monopoly on the news, more or less. Then there was radio — some suggested the end of print. But of course, it didn’t happen. A few decades later, television was forecast to be the end of the written word. More recently, 24-hour news networks and the continual news cycle are the raven of the broadsheet. Now, it’s internet readership and citizen journalism.
I’m of the opinion that the internet is a more potent foe because of the combination of two elements: immediacy (e.g., the news is there, right away) and ubiquity (an awful lot of people have access to it via one form or another). It’d be easy to believe that all those people who used to pay for newspapers are simply reading online — I know it’s happened to me.
I think, however, that this is too easy an explanation: circulation is down much more than page views are up. Also, if reader who defect are as high-value as some suggest, why aren’t their page views more valuable from an advertising perspective online.
Whatever the cause of the declines, it’s clear to me that a drastic action like this won’t drive users back to their subscriptions (online or off). Newspapers are far from the only reliable news source of record: the 24-hour news networks are well-established, entrenched nationwide, and have earned a respectable modicum of trust.
Taking away articles from AOL, Yahoo, or Google will simply result in licensing deals being struct with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. And, in my mind, that’s probably what will happen anyway. The amount of energy with which newspapers cover local news has declined substantially, classifieds no longer hold a candle to online advertising, and the appeal of anytime information have combined to wean readers away from the morning news. Cutting them off will only accelerate a transition to 24-hour news sources that’s been happening for 20 years.
So, how should a newspaper respond? For the slew of papers who package a thin sliver of journalism around a thick package of wire stories and advertising, there may be no home. Major papers of record probably stand the best chance since they have a brand which resonates nationwide. To cover their costs, they will need to tighten their belts, improve their advertising model, and rethink partnerships. The biggest question in my mind is whether groups like the AP are a good idea online — they seem to be enabling competition in ways which probably aren’t profitable for the papers which own the AP.
And Citizen Journalism, while exotic and new, probably won’t change the world all that much. Although it is great for scandal…